10 - Development of abiotic stress–tolerant mustard genotype through induced mutagenesis

Abstract

Climate change has negative impact on sustainable agriculture and food security. It refers to increase in temperature, erratic rainfall, and higher atmospheric CO2. These changes influence the plant growth rates, photosynthetic efficiency, transpiration rates, and crop yield. Mustard, an important oilseed crop, influenced its yield potentiality due to erratic weather conditions. Developing climate-resilient crop varieties can be achieved through understanding of the physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms of plant adaptation and incorporation of stress-tolerant linked traits. Besides conventional breeding approaches, mutation breeding has paved the way to generate novel variability for desirable traits including abiotic stresses. Through mutagenesis, new alleles for tolerance to abiotic stresses with superior yield have been generated. TILLING (targeting-induced local lesions in genomes) and CRISPRcas are reverse genetic techniques and could be useful for identification and generation of stress specific variability. An overview on above aspects shall be presented here.